Guilty Until Proven Innocent

On April 1, 2008, Ali Sid Abdilahi was driving back from a session at American Truck Training in Newport to his home in St. Paul when he saw a girl, streaked with blood and lying in the street.

She was waving frantically, but all the other cars passed her by. Abdilahi stopped to ask if he could help and she clung to the passenger side window while explaining her situation-her boyfriend had beaten her and she needed a ride to her mother's house nearby. She then climbed into his car. But after only a couple of blocks she changed her mind, saying she couldn't tell her mother what had happened and she wanted to go to a friend's house across town instead.

"I did not have time to take her that far," says Abdilahi, who had a two-week-old infant at the time. "I had to get home to my family. So I gave her a couple dollars to take the bus and went home."

He parked his car in the garage and went out for the evening with his wife and daughters. When he returned, his car was gone and there was a detective's business card in its place. Abdilahi called the number to find out what had happened, but rather than explaining why they'd confiscated his car, the police showed up moments later and arrested the 31-year-old man. He was locked up for two days. When he asked why, the officers said only, "You tell us."

The story hit local evening newscasts on April 2, which is how Abdilahi's wife found out that her husband had been accused of the attempted kidnapping and false imprisonment of a 14-year-old girl. She went to their immigration lawyer, who put her in touch with the criminal defense attorney Paul Edlund.

It was Edlund who finally explained to Abdilahi on April 3 that the bloody girl he had stopped to help called 911 after he left her with bus money and reported that two men had tried to drag her into their car but she'd successfully fought them off. She couldn't give a very detailed description of the man she had claimed jumped out and grabbed her, saying only that he was large, bald and dark. But Abdilahi-the "driver" in her story, who remained seated inside-she described in excruciating detail, down to his wire-rim glasses, pants, shirt and Nike Air Force Ones with a baby-blue pinstripe down the sides.

She had memorized and recited the license plate of the car. When police went to Abdilahi's house, they found the car she'd described with blood on the exterior of the passenger-side door. The supposed victim was a white teenage girl, her aggressor a swarthy Somali man going to truck-driving school on a nearly expired green card. Everyone, it seemed, believed he'd done what she said-including the other inmates at the county jail.

"On the third day I was there," Abdilahi recalls, "I came outside to eat lunch and saw my pictures on TV. A big guy came up to me and said, ‘I have a daughter. You tried to rape a little girl. What should I do to you?' After that, I didn't come out of my bed."

Two people believed Abdilahi hadn't done it: his wife and his attorney.

"I have to be honest," says Edlund. "I've heard many people claim they're innocent, so I didn't think much of Ali's story at first. But when I talked to him in the jail and told him what he'd been accused of, he had this blank look. He said, ‘What girl?' I told him it was a 14-year-old in St. Paul and I saw his face light up; it was apparent he knew who the alleged victim was. I felt confident, just based on what Ali told me. But the following day, in court, I was given a copy of the police report and any fair reading of it would show it was a fabricated story."

Together with a professional investigator, Edlund went to the scene of the alleged crime. They got video footage of Abdilahi from the gas station where he'd stopped prior to picking up the girl, which showed he was alone in his car. They went to the impound lot and re-enacted her version of events.

"We took turns, the investigator and I," Edlund says. "One of us would sit inside and the other one would hang onto the car. What we determined was the person on the outside could not see the driver's shoes from any conceivable angle."

In addition to this, attorneys on both sides of the case quickly learned that the girl had made a call falsely reporting that she was being raped only three weeks before. But even despite this evidence, the Ramsey County Attorney's office was determined to prosecute Abdilahi.

"At Ali's very first appearance, I pulled the prosecutor aside and said, ‘Look at what this girl is saying. It's total bullshit. Have the police talk to her and give her an out.' And he tried." Edlund is quiet but tense with anger. "This guy called the police investigator, but my sense was the police said, ‘We'll get around to it when we do.'"

In the weeks that followed, Edlund says he went to the lead prosecutor, Theresa Walton, again and again. But it was not until a few days before the trial was scheduled to begin-and after Walton had left the County Attorney's office-that charges were finally dropped.

By this time, Abdilahi had lived through three and a half months of suspicion from his extended family, neighbors and friends. He'd lost his car, because he could not pay the more than $1,000 in towing and storage fees to retrieve it from the impound lot. Local newspapers had published his name, characterizing him as the "driver" in an attempted kidnapping; CNN had broadcast the story as far away as his native Somalia. Abdilahi was unemployed, mortified and broke.

Yet, Edlund says, his pleas for Ramsey County to expedite the case fell on deaf ears. "Even when the facts are weak," he says, "and the so-called victim has made a false accusation before. I think we should all be a little skeptical about allegations, especially coming from young people who really don't appreciate that their actions can change lives. But prosecutors, once they have a case, just stick with it and it's really hard to change their mind."

 

Ramsey County Attorney Susan Gaertner has a very different view of the situation.

"What I find inappropriate are the statements that indicate this was a duh, and an indifferent group of criminal justice people were simply too lazy to follow up," she says. "Here were the facts: we had a victim who was bleeding; her clothes were torn; she had scraped, bloody skin on her knees that had gravel and other roadway material in them. We had fingerprints and blood DNA evidence on the passenger door that verified she had grabbed onto the outside of Mr. Abdilahi's car."

A detective spoke with the girl within two days of Edlund's request, Gaertner says, but he was satisfied that the previous false reports "did not impact her credibility." And over the next two months, a special investigator from the county interviewed her another four or five times to go over the conflicting accounts.

"During this time, our investigator had doubts about [the girl's] story," Gaertner says. "So people from our team met with the alleged victim several times as well, to go over her story and determine whether or not it was credible. We cannot have a system where a young woman recounts something she says happened and just because a defense attorney asks for the case to be dismissed, we drop charges just like that."

She points out that Abdilahi stood accused of an egregious offense, the sort of crime that people take very seriously and want handled with the utmost scrutiny and care. Blood and fingerprint evidence did not come back from the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension lab until June 23, more than two months after the original report; and when it did, it seemed only to support the prosecution's case. Yes, there were holes in the supposed victim's account of what happened. But were her office to begin disbelieving young women who claimed they'd been attacked or raped, the way the criminal justice system treats real victims would slide back decades. It would be irresponsible, disrespectful, a violation of public safety, she says.

Gaertner has since gotten personally involved in trying to clear Abdilahi's name. In the aftermath of the dropped charges, she wrote two letters, one for use with potential employers and another addressed to Abdilahi himself, expressing her regret. Yet she does not believe there is reason to change the way the system works.

"Everybody who touched this case feels very badly that what, by all appearances, was a false accusation has had such a negative effect on Mr. Abdilahi," Gaertner says. "But the conclusion to draw from this cannot be that we stop believing victims. I remain convinced that this case was an anomaly and not the norm. My sense is that false accusation is a very rare occurrence."

 

The statistics don't support Gaertner's statement, though they don't clearly support Edlund's side either.

False accusation is a popular field of study: law scholars are fascinated, but they're also all wildly inconsistent in their findings. It was, in the '70s and '80s, a commonly accepted idea that only 2 percent of all sexual assault allegations are false. But a 1992 study conducted by Charles P. McDowell of the U.S. Air Force Special Studies Division in Washington, D.C., showed that 24 percent of all area rape charges were unfounded. And another study undertaken by Eugene J. Kanin of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Purdue University in 1994 put the figure at a staggering 41 percent.

The truth probably falls somewhere between 2 and 41. The Federal Bureau of Investigation has, for the past decade, estimated the rate of false rape claims nationally to be roughly 9 percent-which most criminal attorneys accept as the best, most accurate figure. Still, determining which 9 out of 100 fit into this category is a tricky business. And in cases involving strangers, the sexual abuse of minors or reported violence, the justice system is prone to err on the side of caution.

This is one case, says Julie Jonas, managing attorney for the Innocence Project of Minnesota, where the suspect is held to a higher standard: guilty until proven innocent. Especially if there is a young child involved.

"Absent DNA, a lawyer has no idea if the client sitting in front of them is innocent or not," Jonas says. "How can they know? How can the jury know? How can the judge know? You have someone who is sitting there accused of sexual misconduct telling you they didn't do it-and you have a child who maybe isn't even very clear on where it happened or when-what can you do?"

In years past, divorce cases were rife with claims of sexual abuse, usually surfacing during a custody dispute. The mid- to late '90s were full of father-on-child claims of molestation that later turned out to be either false or unlikely. But Ed Winer, co-chair of the family law practice at Moss & Barnett, says these cases have gone down dramatically as a result of positive changes in the law.

"There's a very important movement to use outside experts who help with alternative dispute resolution and this has been embraced by the family court bar and judicial officers," Winer says. "Because of that, I think there are fewer accusations. In Hennepin County, for example, there is early, neutral treatment of custody issues and children in divorce cases. So the law has alleviated some of people's fears about ‘losing' their children and therefore, I think, prevented some false allegations from being made."

Where false accusations are still showing up is in public-between strangers, acquaintances or consenting adults. The only common thread is that there's often a sexual or relational component underlying the situation, such as a boyfriend who beats his much younger girlfriend and her subsequent decision to find a scapegoat to blame.

Or take the case of Jill Ajao, a psychologist in St. Paul, who was having an extramarital affair with someone she'd met over the Internet and using her office as a meeting place. When her husband began to suspect, she accused her lover of rape, saying he was a patient who had come to her office supposedly seeking treatment and then attacked her. Ajao's report resulted in a citywide manhunt and the St. Paul Police's sifting through more than 100 tips before discovering the accusation was entirely false. Ultimately, Ajao herself was charged: She spent 20 days in jail, paid a fine and lost her license to practice. What happened to the man she accused is anyone's guess.

Jonas points out that Ajao's target and Abdilahi are among the lucky ones. If police and/or attorneys do not detect a bogus claim and right it in the beginning-in other words, if someone is sent to jail as a result of being falsely accused-there is almost nothing Jonas or anyone else can do.

"The Innocence Project uses DNA to exonerate innocent people," she says. "But typically what happens in a false accusation case is there's no semen or sperm to test, either because the person claims to have gotten away or because they say a rape or attack happened in the past. Sometimes there is semen, but it proves that the man who stands accused actually was there. Most of the cases we're successful at overturning are mistaken identity. False accusation is a much harder thing to prove."

 

Abdilahi, however, is not feeling very lucky these days.

Immediately after the charges against him were dropped, things looked rosy. His attorney contacted the newspapers to tell Abdilahi's follow-up story-which both the Star Tribune and Pioneer Press featured prominently-and publicly he was redeemed. American Truck Training offered him a scholarship to finish his program. Someone donated a car to replace the one he'd lost. People gave money, and good wishes poured in. But as the summer wore on, redemption lost its luster.

After graduating in late summer, Abdilahi was sent out on his first assignment with a real trucking company. He was given a drug test, a logbook and two days of on-the-job training. Then the firm did a background check, and they came back to say Abdilahi was not qualified to work for them. The offer was retracted, as has been every one since.

It turned out Abdilahi's criminal record, showing his arrest for kidnapping, was still active. Edlund applied for an expedited expungement (waiving the 60-day waiting period) and Gaertner signed off. But the courts grind slowly. It took nearly two months anyway for the order to appear in front of a judge and when it did, he or she made an error. So it had to be sent through again.

At the time of our interview, at the end of October, Abdilahi has not yet been cleared. He is unemployed and frustrated, concerned about his family, and openly bitter about the last eight months of his life.

"When this thing first happened," he says, "they believed that girl so fast. Just a couple of hours. But now it's taking so many months to go through the system. I cannot get a job, nothing. Now my wife is pregnant again and she cannot quit her job, she cannot rest. Nobody understands what my family has been through."

Edlund, who has stuck with his client through each disappointment, sighs and promises to call the court again. But before he does, he turns.

"Here's what I've learned working with Ali," he says. "You don't ever get whole after something like this. Even if it's expunged and the newspapers write stories saying you didn't do what you're accused of. Once you're accused of being a kidnapper or a rapist and you live with that for a while, there's a psychological piece that just can't be fixed." 

Postscript: On Nov. 3, 2008, Ali Sim Abdilahi's official expungement was signed by Judge Kathleen R. Gearin and his criminal record was officially sealed.